John Berger Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.

  John Berger

  Death, Time, Character

  John Berger (2008). “Selected Essays of John Berger”, p.751, Vintage

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• The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.

  John Berger

  Animal, Men, Sea

  John Berger (2015). “About Looking”, p.5, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

  John Berger

  Drawing, Connections, Way

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• A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.

  John Berger

  Photographer, Contradiction, Natural

  John Berger, Jean Mohr (2016). “Another Way of Telling: A Possible Theory of Photography”, p.4, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.

  John Berger

  Photography, Drawing, Doe

  John Berger (2015). “About Looking”, p.40, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.

  John Berger

  Envy, Imagine, Buyers

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• The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.

  John Berger

  Zoos, Animal, Opportunity

  John Berger (2015). “About Looking”, p.21, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it's more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.

  John Berger

  Writing, People, World

  "John Berger: a life in writing" by Nicholas Wroe, www.theguardian.com. April 22, 2011.

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• The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.

  John Berger

  Medicine, Soul, Mountain

  John Berger (1995). “Adventure of painting”

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• Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.

  John Berger

  Art, Nature, Drama

  John Berger (2008). “Selected Essays of John Berger”, p.736, Vintage

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• The happiness of being envied is glamour.
  Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power. The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.

  John Berger

  Envy, Reassurance, Illusion

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• What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.

  John Berger

  Loss, Might, Would Be

  John Berger (2014). “The Shape of a Pocket”, p.16, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.

  John Berger

  Artist, Political, Greek

  "The beginning of history" by John Berger, www.theguardian.com. August 24, 2004.

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• A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.

  John Berger

  Animal, Pigs, Two

  John Berger (2011). “About Looking”, p.7, Vintage

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• The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation. Pleasure and pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature

  John Berger

  Pain, Philosophical, Space

  John Berger (2011). “And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos”, p.69, Vintage

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• To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one's fellow countrymen.... But toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.

  John Berger

  Moving, World, May

  John Berger (2014). “And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos”, p.46, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. Its like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.

  John Berger

  Breathing Space, Arches, Cigarette

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• In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles. Writers who have neither product utopian trash.

  John Berger

  Writing, People, Political

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• Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.

  John Berger

  Travel, People, Horizon

  John Berger (2011). “Keeping a Rendezvous”, p.12, Vintage

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• What do drawings mean to me? I really don't know. The activity absorbs me. I forget everything else in a way that I don't think happens with any other activity.

  John Berger

  Mean, Thinking, Forget Everything

  "The Intimate Idealogue". Interview with Robert Enright, bordercrossingsmag.com. April 1995.

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• [O]ften art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. . . .

  John Berger

  Art, Revenge, Past

  John Berger (2011). “Keeping a Rendezvous”, p.9, Vintage

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• The zoo cannot but disappoint.

  John Berger

  Zoos, Animal, Pet

  John Berger (2008). “Selected Essays of John Berger”, p.429, Vintage

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• Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion. The woman's sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion

  John Berger

  Passion, Hair, Needs

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• Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home.

  John Berger

  Home, Smell, Clothes

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• One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.

  John Berger

  Life, Doctors, Knowing

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